Philosophy of Religion
Arguments and problems
- Ontological: God's existence follows from the concept of a greatest conceivable being (Anselm, Descartes).
- Cosmological: contingency and causation require a first cause.
- Teleological: apparent design suggests a designer.
- Moral: objective morality requires a divine ground.
- Problem of evil: the logical version claims evil is incompatible with omnipotence, omniscience and goodness; the evidential version claims evil counts against belief.
Key distinctions
Faith and reason can conflict, complement or operate in separate domains. Religious language may be literal, analogical or non-cognitive. Agnosticism suspends belief; atheism denies it; both differ from indifference. Hume's miracle argument stresses that testimony for a violation of natural law must outweigh the evidence for that law.
Worked example
Epicurus-style argument: if God can prevent evil but will not, God is not good; if willing but unable, not omnipotent. The free-will defence replies that significant freedom requires the possibility of evil. Reasoning: this may answer the logical problem by showing compatibility, but the evidential problem asks whether this world's amount and distribution of suffering are likely under theism.
Traps
- Treating the ontological argument as an empirical inference.
- Confusing logical and evidential problems of evil.
- Defining agnosticism as atheism.